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I am on strike today. I have been struggling of late with a sense of despair about the state of contemporary life, and not knowing what to do about it. None of the mainstream political parties in Britain reflect my values, my sense of what is fair and equitable, my growing anger and horror at a country run for and by millionaires while, at our local Tesco, volunteers ask for donations to the food bank, because people do not have enough money to eat, or to feed their children.

I am a university lecturer. I teach English. I have been struggling of late to make sense of a workplace whose principles run counter to what I believe a university should be and what it should be for: the pursuit of learning, of research and scholarship into science, into society, into culture, of dissemination of knowledge that has a direct social and political function, an understanding of the world that helps people make better lives, personally and collectively: NOT a machine for making money, NOT a busines…

Today is, of course, the 50th anniversary of the
assassination of President John F Kennedy, as well as that of the deaths of
Aldous Huxley and CS Lewis. I note with interest that today’s Google doodle does
not correspond to any of these three men, but to the 50th
anniversary of Dr Who, which was first broadcast the evening following these
events. But the advent of a popular science fiction tv series based upon the
wanderings and adventures of a time traveller seems curiously appropriate to
1963, somehow.
Sometimes I feel myself to be out of time. Born in 1969, I
can claim ownership to that decade not only because I was born in its fading
months (I was round for the Apollo 11 landings, for Altamont Speedway, for the
deaths by drowning of Brian Jones and Mary Jo Kopechne, for My Lai, for the
first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus; hell, John and Yoko got married
on the day of my birth), but because growing up, the Sixties were immediate
history. My Dad told me about 60s tv befo…

I went down to the Shorelines literary festival, held at
Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, over the weekend. Leigh is the next town along the A13
from the town I grew up in and in which my family still live, Hadleigh; Leigh
is where I worked for 2 years, and where my friend Ed lived, whose house, the
Vicarage by St Clement’s church, was the rehearsal base for our band
Tortoisehead, and the launching-place (and often late-night video watching) for
our Friday and Saturday night nights out at a sequence of Leigh pubs (The Olde
Smack Inn and latterly the Crooked Billet in Old Leigh; but mainly the Grand
Hotel, the favourite watering-hole of the Feelgood’s singer Lee Brilleaux).
One of the sessions had a particularly poignant moment for
myself and old friend Simon, who had also come down from elsewhere to sample
the festival’s events. This was a group walk around Leigh in the company of
Justin Hopper, whose poem sequence Public Record: Estuary memorialises the
disasters and loss of life that regular…

So, a kind of confession. The kind a person might make on
reaching what used to be called the ‘middle age’, when you’ve reached a point in
professional life, a foothold; more than that, when you’ve reached solid
ground, something near to achievement. Nearly.
Antonio Salieri is the patron saint of mediocrity; or at
least, Peter Shaffer’s Salieri, I mean. In Amadeus,
Salieri is a composer at the court of the Emperor of Austria whose gifts of
devotion and hard work are superseded by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s carelessly
curated genius, a creative gift from God that Mozart knows not how to pursue properly. Mozart is excessive: scatological,
childlike, wanton. Salieri is the consummate courtier.
There are two brilliant moments of appreciation of Mozart’s
music in Milos Forman’s film adaptation of Amadeus
(which now exists in theatrical release and ‘Director’s Cut’ forms; much of the
tonal difference between them is in the depiction of Salieri, who is much more
sympathetic in the original …

If it came down to a choice between Star Wars and Star Trek,
for me, it’s not much of a contest: for all that I grew up watching Star Trek (TOS) re-runs on terrestrial tv, watched the entirety of the runs of
TNG, DS9 and Voyager (Enterprise didn’t do much for me) in the
80s and 90s, and have a deep and abiding fondess for Shatner, I only own a
couple of the movies on dvd, and only Star
Trek: The Motion Picture is one that I re-watch for pleasure. By
comparison, I own all the Star Wars
films, have the Clone Wars dvds, Star
Wars Lego, and even went to see The
Phantom Menace at the cinema twice (the second time on its recent 3D
re-release). (That’s dedication.)
However, I recently sat down to watch Star Trek Into Darkness, and while the post 9/11 analogies are a
bit pat, the question that is poses about the Federation itself – Scotty says
to Kirk at one point, when questioning the arrival of advanced missiles aboard
the Enterprise, ‘I thought we were meant to be explorers’ – is a parti…

The Tree Of Life
is a very unusual film. Not because of
the dinosaur. Well, partly because of
the dinosaur. But mainly because it uses
the register of cosmological science fiction – in particular 2001 – to tell what is, it seems, by
fairly conventional domestic story : the traumatic loss of a son and brother;
father-son conflict; rites of passage in 1950s America; the failures of
authoritarian patriarchal masculinity.
The film is presented in an extraordinary way, as a series of moments,
often of striking beauty, in which dialogue is generally absent (crucial
thematically), time is dislocated on a local, global and cosmological scale
(seconds, minutes, years, decades, eons), but a sense of wonderment at (and the
wonderment of) life is immanent.
This wonderment, even bewilderment, is carried not only in
the extraordinary image-track, but also in the familiar Malick device of the
disembodied voice over, in which baffled and self questioning voices express
the interiority of key char…

In Jon
Ronson's The Psychopath Test, the author uncovers the case of
a strange book called Being or Nothingness by
Joe K being sent out to unwitting academics, mainly those in fields pertaining
to AI. The first chapter of the book narrates Jonson's attempts to get to the
bottom of this literary prank, partly through the work of Douglas Hofstadter
(author of Godel, Escher, Bach and I
Am A Strange Loop) whom Jonson at first suspects, but then discovers
had been sent some 70 copies in English and 10 in Swedish of this very book. I
won't give away the solution to his odd riddle, though it's pretty prosaic (and
is really Jonson's book's Macguffin), but it fascinated me; not only that
someone would go to the expense of producing a high-quality item but that they
would send them out as gifts to unknown parties. I've
thought of buying one - there's a couple on Amazon - but this would be a bit
beside the point. I'd love to receive one through the post, thoug…

‘Can you see the Real
Me?’ (‘The Real Me’) Driving up to the Placing
Morecambe symposium held at Lancaster University a few weeks ago, I listened to The Who’s Quadrophenia album. This was a happy accident. A few days before,
trawling through the hard-drive on our Freeview receiver, I noticed that the
excellent BBC4 documentary on the making of Quadrophenia
was still there, and sat down to watch. Later, the psyche gave me a nudge and I
put my Who box-set and Quadrophenia
in the car. Only half-way up the motorway did I realise the appropriateness: in
the story told by the concept album, Jimmy, the young Mod, suffering from a
personality disorder that Townshend dubs ‘quadrophenia’ (Pete wanted to make
the album in quadraphonic sound, but it turned out strictly stereo, four faces
condensed to two) has a kind of breakdown, and travels from his South London
home to Brighton, where he has an epiphany at the sea-side. The album ends
ambiguously: the listener doesn’t know whether Jimmy ends his…